Big winner

Just a little preview of what yours truly will be up to this Thursday at the GHI Workforce Challenge 5K in downtown Albany ... Actually I expect that the race winners will be on their third beer or so by the time I cross the finish line. It's my first race of any sort, ever, and I'm not thinking of it as a race so much as a valiant attempt to finish. It's supposed to be a little chilly and overcast but hopefully the rain will hold out - I've never attempted a run in the rain and I'm assuming my sneakers aren't waterproof.

It was funny because yesterday I was talking to one of the court officers about the race, and he said, "you don't seem like the type to run a race," and I said, "I'm definitely not the type to run a race!" I have never been and will never be an athlete, but I'm starting to think that this is truly necessary for my health. And wouldn't you know, after eight weeks I'm kinda starting to like the whole running thing. A little tiny bit.

These days ...

It's springtime now, everything seems glorious, and we're up to new things. Ben and I are most excited about our recent acquisitions:



We bought two kayaks! They are Current Designs Kestrel 120s, one green and one orange. The green one in the picture is the right size and shape but ours is all green, without that white on the bottom. The orange one in the picture is the right color but a little shorter than ours. We named them Clementine and Sweet Pea.

We also had to get the requisite gear:



So now we're all set! A few days ago we put them in the water at a local lake, paddled right up to a pizza joint, got out and had pizza and a beer, and then paddled back into the sunset. We decided this has to be our new summer routine.

We have fallen in love with some other things too. A couple of recent Berkshire jaunts have led us to the firm conclusion that in seeking the ideal place to build our future home, what we've really been looking for is The Shire (of Lord of the Rings fame). We are short enough to be a couple of hobbits, after all. Anyway, we believe we found our Shire, and it's a place called Williamstown, Massachusetts.



Beautiful, no?

On a Williamstown trip, we also decided that we want our future home to be modeled after the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College, a 170-year-old stone structure that is the oldest continually operating observatory in the country. It has features we have always liked anyway, such as the hexagonal tower room on top, and we love the proportions and classic design. Why not, right?














As for me, I've been keeping busy and especially happy drinking up all this sunshine.
Currently reading:










Also working on:

Performing with Ben is so much fun. In June he'll be releasing a six-song EP, which will probably be entitled "We Are Giants Now." Our friend Matthew Loiacono's label, Collar City Records, will be releasing it, and it'll be available on iTunes as well. The songs sound great and Ben has been adding electronic beats, instruments, and even sampled sounds of tree frogs and birds to the mixes. We've been introducing those to the live show too, which is quite the technical challenge. When we have the full set-up, it's Ben on guitar and vocals; Dan Sorensen on drums; Matthew on mandolin, banjo, and vocals; and me on bass guitar, keyboard, and vocals. It sounds awesome, though between the computer running the electronic tracks and all of our in-ear monitor wires, the stage is covered with more wires than I can count. We're having a lot of fun with it.

Happy May!

Rainy day.

Copping from my friends Liz and Dan, here is a list of my Top 5 Albums for a Rainy Day. (Although they wrote theirs for a snow day, it's no longer snowy in upstate New York - we have entered monsoon season.) Qualifications for list status: must be an album you can thoroughly enjoy listening to from start to finish without skipping over any tracks. I find that to be a tall order because there are SO many wonderful songs out there that just didn't make it onto a 5-star album full of nothing but other stellar tracks. Sometimes an artist has a real burst of inspiration that doesn't necessarily carry through an entire album, forcing them to come up with some filler to conform to the album format. I don't hold that against artists any more because I think the album is kind of an artificial construct and doesn't need to be the way people acquire music any more (not exactly a groundbreaking pronouncement - clearly the album is losing ground in today's music scene). Anyway, to dig up such gems I'm finding I have to look outside the current decade - any big surprise there?

In autobiographical order:

The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper
Paul Simon: Graceland
Bonnie Raitt: self-titled
Ladysmith Black Mambazo: Liph' Iquinso
Weezer: Pinkerton

Apparently they stopped making good albums when I graduated high school.

Is there a theme here? Sing-alongables? Certainly not, as I can't sing one word of the Ladysmith album. But that album, along with the others, were all listened to so intensely at a certain point of my life that the entire group of songs evokes a time and place and set of emotions which I wouldn't mind re-living sometime. Next rainy day, maybe.

The struggle.

I was reading about Sandra Day O'Connor, and what a fascinating life she has had. She came from about as rural an upbringing you can possibly imagine, on a ranch a thousand miles away from anything in the middle of the Arizona desert, yet she went on to become a pillar of society and a politician and activist who made herself the vital center of everything she got involved in. Of course, as I read her story, I was waiting for the part that we all know about - the part where she becomes the first female justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. For some reason I had thought she was appointed in the 1970s, but I learned that it was not until after I was born, during the Reagan administration, that she took the bench. That gave me pause. I started thinking about how, over the past few years in law school, I have met many powerful women in varied positions of influence, yet almost all had one thing in common: they were the "first woman" in their position. First female Supreme Court judge in New York, first female criminal court judge in Albany, first female judge on the New York Court of Appeals and the first to be its Chief Judge. All of these women are still holding their positions right now, or have held them in just the past few years. I ran into a friend yesterday who told me her mother is the only female election law expert in New York.

It just astounds me to hear these anecdotes day after day. This is not the 1970's, this is 2008. Perhaps my particular field, law, is lagging in catching up to gender equality. But I think that the loftiest and most influential positions in our society are still largely out of reach for women. I'll bet that most girls growing up today think that women's rights was their mother's or grandmother's issue. They think that they face no gender discrimination in their lives and are free to pursue any path they choose, and to find success as far along that path as they feel like travelling. And yet, in those positions of greatest power, women are just not equally represented. Maybe there are fewer women choosing to pursue those positions and all the sacrifices they entail, because capable working women are still expected to do the lion's share of the work inside the home, caring for the family as well (don't anyone even try to fight me on this point because it is extremely well-documented - just don't even go there). And maybe there are just fewer women than men with that kind of innate drive and hunger for power. But I do believe that our society would do well to have more women making the kinds of broad policy decisions that have the greatest impact on all of our lives, and there doesn't seem to be much of a push in that direction anymore. Of course, the most powerful position of all, the presidency, is closer than ever to having a woman take the job, but that's looking less and less likely as the days pass. No matter how much I might like that other guy, I am feeling a real loss that this opportunity is probably slipping away. How long will it take? And how many more "firsts" do we still have to achieve?

Sheryl No.

I've thought long and hard about whether to write this. I don't want to send out any unnecessary negativity into the world, where there is plenty already. I have nothing against Sheryl Crow as a person. She went through a very public break-up, she battled breast cancer for God's sake, she adopted a baby, she does good work for charity. I give her a lot of credit for how she lives her life. I cannot, however, give her a lot of credit for her music. I decided I had to write about this because at times I feel I am the only person on the planet who has not fallen under the Sheryl spell. Granted, I have not listened to her new record in its entirety yet, but what I've heard - dare I say it - I don't like.

She's being given all kinds of credit for this "stripped down," "raw" song she plays as the album opener, called "God Bless This Mess." It's just her and her acoustic guitar and it's supposed to be all political and passionately anti-war. It has lyrics like, "My brother came home yesterday / From somewhere far away / He doesn't look like I remember / As he just stares off into space / He must have seen some ugly things / He cannot seem to say." Ok. To me, this comes off like high school notebook poetry. And when you listen to the song, it sounds like the first song Dar Williams ever wrote in 10th grade. She's trying to go for sort of a spare bluegrass feel; what may feel original to a pop singer comes off amateur to the listener. A bluegrass singer/songwriter she ain't. Then there's another song, "Love is Free," which I have a really hard time swallowing. Coming from a person who has purchased the most idyllic comfortable life imaginable on a huge beautiful rural ranch with dozens of horses and acres of solitude (do I sound jealous? I am), it's difficult to listen to lines that are supposed to be from the perspective of someone devastated by Hurricane Katrina: "Greasy fingers in your jelly jar / They jack your money while you sleep in your car ... Devil take your money / Money got no hold on me / Everybody making love 'cause love is free." Doesn't bowl me over with its sincerity.

Blender gave her only 2.5 stars, which I was relieved to see, but they went on to basically say that she just aims too low and "camouflages her leftist ideas," "hoping the red-staters won't notice she's gone pink." I don't think she was just aiming low and softening her message because she thinks people can't take her radical ideas. This isn't exactly radical stuff. I don't think she's capable of more political depth. I think that high school poetry was about as deep as she gets and, frankly, it's lame. She was great fun back in the '90's singing about how all she wanted to do was have some fun, and wondering whether some guy was strong enough to be her man. I think she should stick with that. Some publication compared her to Tom Petty as being a critically unassailable yet unwaveringly successful pop artist. Why does she deserve this crown? Just because she plays an instrument and writes her own songs? I think that's setting the bar kind of low.

Offensive to the ear? No. Deserving of universal critical adoration? Heck no.

Props given.

I would be amiss if I did not acknowledge the source of my blogging inspiration. My amazing friend Liz is like the Timbaland of blogging. She is just at the top of her game. My husband lists her among his top 3 heroes and aspires to build a successful online business from scratch like she has. She is sassy and hilarious and you will adore her.

The Daily Stroll
Because I Said So

Marsupial tote.

For my second-ever blog post, I will be discussing knitting. Feel free to tune out at this point if this bores you. I have recently gotten into this lovely winter hobby and am proud of my little projects. First thing I did was knit a scarf for my husband Ben. It was the easiest thing you could make - just garter stitch, which is knitting rows back and forth over and over - but I did use an interesting variegated yarn so that it came out in shades of black, brown, and gray. Incredibly, Ben wears it constantly. I will have to put up a picture of him wearing it - rarely is he caught without it. He refers to it in a faux Scottish accent as "me scarrrrrf."

Project #2 was from the great book "Stitch 'n Bitch," and it is called Meema's Felted Marsupial Tote. This bag looked easy enough, but it turned out a little more challenging than I thought it would be. I thought I would put up my notes in case anyone out there happens to Google the pattern and wants to make it like I did, because I strayed from the book's pattern.

If you want it to look like it does in the book's picture, be warned - IT WILL BE TINY. The book's pattern makes it come out like a little handbag. I started it, saw how tiny it was coming out, and ripped it out and started over. I wanted a good-sized tote bag, so I changed the size. The other odd thing is that even though the pattern is small, they tell you to buy way too much yarn for even a much bigger bag. I only used 2 skeins of orange, and 1 skein plus about 18 yards of pink. You start out by making the bottom of the tote first, and they tell you to cast on 16 stitches and knit 44 rows. I figured I would try to make the bag about 25% bigger, so I casted on 20 stitches and knitted 54 rows. (Are "casted" and "knitted" the proper past tense? Anyway.) So then after that, you pick up stitches and start knitting in the round to make the bag. I did 32 rows in orange, and 26 rows in pink.

Another thing to watch out for is the tricky "right twist" stitch. I searched online to find better directions for it because the ones in the book didn't quite work for me. In my own words, which may work only for me: look at the next two stitches on your left needle. Knit the SECOND one, without slipping anything off the left needle, and then knit the first one. You will feel all twisted up - this is good. You will end up with your right needle positioned between the first and second stitches. Now - slip BOTH off the left needle. It feels like you're dropping a stitch, but you're not! Go ahead and count them, you're fine! Easy as that.

Here are my results. In tooling around online I noticed that most people who've done this project used different colors and yarns, but the radiant colors of this project were what drew me to it in the first place!

This is the finished product, pre-felting:


I then stuck it in the washing machine with some detergent (scary!) and let it go a full 10-minute cycle in very hot water, including spin cycle. I took it out and put a small cardboard box inside it for shaping, and let it air dry.

Final results:



Good luck with this pattern, it's fun and rewarding! I'm using the bag to carry around my knitting projects now!

Hello there.

Hi. I'm Liv. I felt like starting a blog. I am quite self-conscious about this so bear with me at first, at least until I get over myself. Like it says over on the side there, I'm a young lawyer living in upstate New York. Right now it is frigid here, has been for months, and will continue to be so for the indefinite future. It's not stir-craziness that's inspiring me to start blogging, but I do think that everything slows down quite a bit in the winter. Nothing much is going on, and everyone stays at home inside. For my husband and me, it's all about staying within a 10-foot radius of our woodstove, trying to keep warm. I have mixed feelings about the woodstove - love the cozy heat and warmth; dislike dragging logs in from outside and spending half an hour getting soot up to my elbows, trying to coax the damn thing started. It makes me appreciate the effortlessness of turning a dial to get heat, but at the same time I'm grateful not to be supporting our country's oil dependency. Yes, wood heat has plenty of environmental issues of its own. Let's not open up that can of worms.

Anyway, clearly I am a country girl because I have just spent my first blog post debating (with myself) the merits of various types of home heating systems. I'm gonna let this first post speak for itself.